Chaining Down Leviathan

 

A review of Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865 (Abbeville Institute Press, 2021) by Marco Bassani

How is it that America became a “strong but limited” government, and the world’s richest and most free country? That is the central question both considered and answered by Luigi Marco Bassani in his new work, Chaining Down Leviathan: The American Dream of Self-Government 1776-1865. As an eminent scholar, Bassani has long studied the antebellum area, Amercia’s struggle between national vs. local power, and the Jeffersonian tradition that colored the era. By combining all of these subjects into a single work, he endeavors to clarify the dynamics of political power in the early republic.

As it turns out, the federal, decentralized framework that underscored the American political structure was its most distinct characteristic – a feature that is often ignored or downplayed by contemporaries. “The golden age of federalism and federal liberty,” as Bassani puts it, resulted only from the multitude of self-governing societies that composed the federal union, all of which had a plausible claim to challenge the impositions of the federal government. Every command of the central authority, he writes, “was subject to be opposed and contained in a web of competing counterclaims.”

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